Collections & Series

Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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December 24, 2018

The Benaki Museum, in Athens, houses an immense personal collection of antiquities and Byzantine art, especially icons from the so-called Cretan School. Although I'm very interested in Byzantine art, I'm starting from a point of knowing very little about it -- it's our trips to Rome, Sicily, and now Greece that have made me want to learn. I apologize that the photographs aren't better - the combination of the lighting in the galleries and gold leaf on the icons made it really hard to avoid reflections and shine.

Annunciation, by Emmanuel Tzanfornaris, late 16th-early 17th C.

For today, though, I'm just going to post some of the icon paintings we saw at the Benaki that had an Advent or Christmas theme, and include a paraphrase of online articles about what this Cretan School actually was.

The Volpi Nativity, 1st quarter of 15th C. The baby is laid in a strange coffin-like box with a reclining Virgin and pensive Joseph -- but who are all those other characters?

Virgin and Child Enthroned, by Andreas Ritzos, one of the most famous Cretan painters. Second half of 15th C.

In Greece we repeatedly encountered bitter accounts and evidence of the destruction of Christian art, architecture, and artifacts that occurred when the cities of the Byzantine empire fell to the Ottoman Turks. After Constantinople was taken over by the Turks in 1453, a number of Byzantine scholars and artists fled, especially to Venice.

"The émigrés were grammarians, humanists, poets, writers, printers, lecturers, musicians, astronomers, architects, academics, artists, scribes, philosophers, scientists, politicians and theologians. They reintroduced the teaching of the Greek language to their western counterparts, and brought with them Classical texts that were printed on the first printing presses for Greek books in Venice in 1499. Orthodox Christians in other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean gave money to endow monasteries and allow them to continue their work. One major example was on the island of Crete, which was occupied by the Venetians from 1204 until 1669, and was one of the last Greek islands to have fallen to the Ottoman Turks. The Cretan School of icon-writing became the predominant force in Greek painting during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and helped to supply the demand for Byzantine icons throughout Europe. The Cretan artists developed a particular style of painting under the influence of both Eastern and Western artistic traditions and movements; the most famous product of the school, El Greco, was the most successful of the many artists who tried to build a career in Western Europe, and also the one who left the Byzantine style farthest behind him in his later career.

By the late 15th century, Cretan artists had established a distinct icon-painting style, distinguished by "the precise outlines, the modelling of the flesh with dark brown underpaint and dense tiny highlights on the cheeks of the faces, the bright colours in the garments, the geometrical treatment of the drapery, and, finally the balanced articulation of the composition", "sharp contours, slim silhouettes, linear draperies and restrained movements". (Wikipedia:the Cretan School, and Patrick Comerford, The Cretan School of Icons and its Contribution to Western Art.)

With these beautiful, enigmatic images, I want to wish a Merry Christmas to all of you!

Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Ioannis Permeniatus, first half of 16th century

December 17, 2018

Apollo and Athena look down on Troy. Alice and Martin Provensen, The Iliad and the Odyssey (Golden Books)

When I was 8, my parents went on a trip to Kentucky, leaving me in the care of my maternal grandparents, who lived downstairs. I don't remember the circumstances; it must have had to do with my father's work, but this trip was exceptional. Except for visiting my father's dying brother in Florida, fifty years later, it was the only time my mother ever flew on an airplane. She was asthmatic at a time when that disease was not well-controlled, and travel was difficult and anxiety-provoking for both my parents. But that one time, they went. I remember feeling confused and nervous, but trying to be good about it. And I remember when they came back home, both because I was very glad to see them, and because my mother brought me a special present that she had found in a city bookstore in Louisville.

It was The Golden Book of Myths and Legends, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, and I was instantly captivated. The book also included the tales of Beowulf, the Battle of Roncevaux, Tristram and Iseult, Rustem and Sohrab, and Sigurd of the Volsungs, but the entire first half was devoted to the Greek myths. I pored over the paintings: Prometheus stole fire from heaven; Theseus faced the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth; a helmeted Jason fled with the Golden Fleece, Daedalus stood on a rooftop studying the birds. I was already a good reader, but my mother helped me with the text and unfamiliar words, and together we studied the pictures and talked about the stories. She had studied Greek art in college, and showed me how the illustrators had adapted the style of ancient vase paintings to a modern idiom. She pulled out her copy of Bullfinch's Mythology when I wanted to know more. Although she didn't know how to read Greek, she taught me to recite the letters of the alphabet, and how to write the characters, and we talked about the Greek origins of many English words.

That Christmas, my parents gave me the Provensen's illustrated Iliad and Odyssey. My mother read it to me when I was sick in bed, and again we pored over the pictures -- these were even more closely linked to Greek vase paintings. She talked to me about the use of positive and negative space; I traced and copied some of the illustrations. The story and the characters got under my skin and into my head, and stayed there, while the gods and goddesses, in profile, looked down on the warring camps of Greeks and Trojans from the heights of Mt. Olympus, their feuds and jealousies mirroring the behaviors of people I knew. I identified most with grey-eyed Athena, who remained above the love-quarrels by staying a virgin, and encouraged wisdom, intellect, and music as well as being the patron goddess of the Athenians. We read the story countless times, and in spite of my preference for Athena, I always went against her and rooted for the Trojans, knowing it was fated for them to lose, but somehow hoping that my wishes would make the story turn out differently. It was the same when I got to university and enrolled in ancient Greek classes, and, in the second semester, opened my student edition of Homer to the first words of the Iliad. And it's been the same every time since, in every translation: the inevitability of defeat battling with my desire for a different result, as if human fate itself could be held suspended or reversed by the force of my own free will. Much later, I would come to see that the Greeks themselves were concerned with the same questions of fate vs free will, and that it would play a large part in the development of their tradition of tragic drama and exert a profound influence on Christianity, and later western drama and philosophy.

I can't explain the hold that this art and this particular story has had on me, all my life; all I can do is trace it back to its origin. I became a classics major; I almost decided to teach art history or become a conservator of antiquities, but instead became a graphic designer and artist - and I'm convinced to this day that my early study of those vase paintings, and their positive-negative harmony, and the beautiful carved inscriptions of perfectly-balanced Greek letters, had a lot to do with why I became a designer and careful typographer myself, and why my own art has always been concerned with line, and with volume.

Laying Out of a Young Man in the Family Circle, Attic Greek, around 400 BC, white-ground polychrome lechythos (Altes Museum, Berlin)

One day shortly before J. and I left for Greece in mid-November, I began thinking about my mother, and my eyes suddenly filled with tears: how she would have loved to go! Yet in 83 years, she never left the continental U.S. and, like many people in my travel-averse family, hardly ever traveled far from her rural home. But she traveled the world vicariously through me, and through books and the pages of The New Yorker and New York Times, often sending me clippings about some new archaeological discovery. Now, all these years later, I was finally going there, and she was gone from the earth; I wouldn't even be able to tell her what I saw. That particular morning, the prospect seemed unbearable, and I wept. But later, while packing, I decided to wear one of her silver bracelets throughout the trip, and I spontaneously pulled out a favorite black-and-white photograph of her, and stuck it in the back of my sketchbook. When we arrived in Athens, I put the photograph on the table in front of the mirror, and went up to the roof, and saw the Acropolis and the Parthenon for the first time. She was there with me, then, and in my heart, I told her all about it.

December 14, 2018

Dear Readers, apologies for my long silence. I've been away on a trip to Greece, a place I've wanted to visit for an entire lifetime. As the title of this blog implies, I've felt a personal identification with ancient Greece and its stories, gods and goddesses, art and thought. It's what I studied when I was young, and for a while I thought I'd either be a ancient art history professor or a conservator of antiquities. That's not how my life turned out, and part of the reason for this trip was to revisit that earlier self, as well as the place, and see what I thought from a different point in life.

It was a marvelous journey, filled with surprises and adventures not only in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, but in the mountains of northern Greece; and not only concerned with ancient history and art, but also with a quest to see and learn more about the Byzantines. We were gone for sixteen days, and started our travels in Berlin, where we visited one of the best collections of ancient Greek vases and sculptures in the world, at the Altes Museum, as well as going to the Reichstag, taking long walks, trying to stay warm (it was almost as chilly as Montreal) and eating some excellent German food. Then we flew to Athens, where we began and ended our travels in Greece.

I have a lot I want to write about, but it's going to have to wait a bit because...Christmas...and singing, and friends and family, as well as some significant responsibilities here at home. The jetlag in this direction, back home, was really fierce, and I've been really busy besides. Today is the first day since returning a week ago that I've had any time to work on my pictures and videos, and I did get them transferred to my computer. So, eventually, there will be more to share here.

Travel completely engages me when I'm there, and then feels almost unreal when return to my own space. And yet, flight makes those sudden shifts in reality possible. I wouldn't call it disorienting, per se, but it is certainly strange to find yourself inhabiting an image like the one above, that you've seen in countless sources, from textbooks to travel videos. We don't go on tours but figure out our itinerary and plans completely from scratch, and unexpected things happen, so during the trips we always feel like we're very heads-up, paying sharp attention; there's a high level of intensity. I try hard to really be in a place -- to feel it and engage with it with all my senses as well as my mind -- and not just be a person behind a camera, capturing moments like trophies. It takes time to think about a significant journey and to see what I've learned and how it has changed me; I'm doing that now and will be doing it for quite a long time. And I already want to go back. There were good reasons why, as a young girl, Greece got under my skin. I see that better now, and am glad I wasn't disappointed by being face to face with the real thing. Yet I also see that I made the right decision to live a less linear and more personally creative life; it was a better fit with who I really am, but in many ways, it has been a reflection of the values and ideals that attracted me to the Greeks in the first place. As a woman, I'm lucky I live now, though, instead of back then.

November 07, 2018

The first two Native-American women. First two Muslim women. First Somali-American, a former refugee. Youngest woman ever, a Latina. First black female congresswoman from her state...They are the hope for me today: the brown female faces of those who won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with many white women who also won races, and the first gay male state governor. These are the faces of the future — though their majority power may be very far away, beyond my lifetime even.

When I look at the map, the polarization is depressingly clear, and I can’t even feel smug about Quebec being better, after our last election. It was just the same: most of the rural, homogeneous French-Canadian areas went conservative, while the diverse metropolitan areas (chiefly Montreal) were solidly progressive. The real question in so many places today seems to be: do you want someone who will actually work for the things that benefit all people, or do you want someone who looks like you, expresses the same fears, and wants to go back to the past?

There were a lot of “firsts” yesterday. That’s very significant, though it made me simultaneously weep with happiness at seeing those faces, and rage that it’s taken so long and come with such a hard fight –- which will, of course, have to continue. And I'm not naive. These are modest gains, and even a Democratically-controlled House will, at best, create a stalemate with the executive branch and Senate, that will of course be blamed for blocking legislation and starting investigations. I'm appalled at the support this president still enjoys, and in some parts of the country, it seems more solid than ever, with a looming possibility of re-election in 2020.

--

Looking at the Senate and House electoral maps today caused me to reflect on the election of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States, ten years ago. The church’s polity is set up the same way as Congress, with a House of Bishops, one from each diocese, and a much larger body made up of lay delegates and clergy, equally represented by four of each from every diocese. In every single step toward inclusivity — allowing the ordination of the first black priest, the first woman, the first openly gay priest, and then bishops in each of those categories — the House of Deputies voted positively years before the House of Bishops did, and in exactly that order: blacks, women, gay. And of course, representation in the House of Deputies was itself reflective of that diversity long before there were black, female, and gay bishops. But it did happen. The people in the churches elected the delegates and changed those bodies; the lay delegates pushed the clergy to be more progressive, and eventually even the House of Bishops changed. It's inevitable, but it took a long, long time even in one of the most progressive religious denominations in the United States. Ten years later, however, a great deal has changed in attitudes toward homosexuality in the general population, friends and colleagues, and forced them to confront a choice between love or rejection of real people. We should see this as an indication that change is absolutely possible.

--

I've been on the side of immigrants and non-whites all my life, and especially so since marrying into an Arab/Armenian immigrant family, with multiple personal histories of genocide and narrow escapes from persecution to begin life again in new places. Twelve years of being a Canadian-American, and having opportunities to travel, especially in Latin America, have only made me MORE sympathetic and more identified with migrants and refugees. I’m grateful for my life experiences and fervently wish I could share them with a lot more people, because I think if you don’t live it, or have very close relationships with people who do, it’s hard to really get it. Thus, the map we keep seeing, and the fears that keep being exploited.

Besides this endemic hatred of "the other", the environment is the other issue that creates ongoing despair for me. There is so little time, and so little will on the parts of governments -- in fact I believe we've already passed a critical window where reversal was possible. So much of what I have valued and loved about the Earth is in danger of being lost forever. To me, this is the fundamental issue of our time, and even here in Quebec, where many people say they do care about the natural world and live close to it, the new government feels it is not important, and secondary to economic concerns. How shortsighted can we be?

Today is a day to rejoice in a first step back from the precipice Trump's presidency has placed us in. Frankly, though, we can't let up for a minute.

April 26, 2018

We rented an apartment in Mexico City, in the same general area (Condesa/Roma) we've stayed in recently, but a bit closer to Chapultepec Park, metro and metrobus stations, and the major streets of Paseo de la Reforma and Insugentes Sur. It turned out to be an excellent fit for us, with a well-equipped kitchen, good appliances, a comfortable bed and living room, lots of storage, a washing machine, a balcony, and 24-hour security.

Looking northwest from our balcony, toward Reforma.

But one of its best aspects was its height: we were on the 8th floor of a 14-story building, with access to the roof, good views to the west of the city and Chapultepec castle, the flight path of airplanes coming into Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez, and the dramatic thunderstorms that moved eastward across the mountains into the city on a number of late afternoons. We spent way more time than we'd anticipated in this aerie, just watching and looking and listening, whether it was the life on the streets and rooftops below or helicopters landing on pads on top of the skyscrapers on Reforma.

Street vendors below a date palm.

Mexico City's official color is hot pink, and so are its taxis.

Nighttime on a beautiful, clear evening - usually the pollution got worse during the day and then sometimes cleared out at night.

It was interesting and disturbing to see the differences in pollution and atmospheric conditions each day -- sometimes we could see the mountains, but more often not. We only went up on the roof once, on the afternoon we arrived, which turned out to be one of the clearest days of the sixteen we were there. More often, it was like the photo below.

I sketched the urban landscapes from our windows: not my usual subject, but the view and its endless details compelled me to try. Here's a pen-and-ink version:

And one with added watercolor and gouache:

The first drawing engendered this exchange on Instagram:

Me: I had fun doing this but it's also kind of exhausting!XB: I can imagine it, hard to keep chaos and balance all together.Me: Yes, it's just a lot of stuff, and easy to get confused where you are, while trying to keep a general sense of balance through the whole scene. What to leave out, what to leave in. And, of course, perspective. I don't use lines but try to be fairly accurate by eye, and mistakes always happen!XB: mistakes are... beautiful

April 24, 2018

Between singing at yesterday's services, I walked the quiet streets of my city. Queen Victoria stood coldly on her pedestal, the sun -- wan, but at least palpable -- shone on pale faces, but in the cafe where I finally stopped, a coach on the video screen was explaining hockey plays to little boys, still eagerly piling out onto the ice.

We'd been back from Mexico City for just two days. I felt disoriented, bereft. I missed the vast swarms of humanity at street crossings, the noise and exuberance, their luxurious black hair and relaxed faces; the riotous colors; the smells of frying meat, onions, chili, potatoes, corn, spices; the excessive surface decoration, the effortless mix of elegance with the popular street. We're so tame up here, I thought. So reservé, so diplomatique indeed.

In the cafe, I thought about how my choir would be singing Orlando Gibbons in a few minutes, with his tightly coiled but always-contained emotion. I love that music: it's part of my heritage, after all. But more and more, I find important parts of myself released in the warmth of Latin cultures, and it's hard both to leave that exuberance and largeness behind, and to preserve my discovered self in this much cooler and more private place.

--

Avenida Francisco I. Madero, in the historical center

It's always a shock to come back to Montreal from Mexico City, that maximum metropolis of 22 million people which fills the vast Valley of Mexico. After six trips, we've come to know it fairly well, and to feel comfortable there: we know where to go, how to get around, where to buy what we need, what to eat and what to avoid, where to get information, who to trust. There are favorite places we return to each time -- favorite paintings and artifacts, restaurants, public plazas, churches, markets, streets -- and there is always exploring and adventure. It's intense but no longer intimidating, so long as we don't take foolish risks, and accept the fact that unexpected things may happen. Over the years we've had bike accidents, and tripped on the uneven pavement; we've had phones stolen on crowded metro platforms; dealt with the altitude and pollution and figured out what to do in case of an earthquake; we've gotten sick and been helped and survived. What we've gained has vastly outweighed the problems. Some people probably wouldn't like that learning curve, or maybe they just want travel to be more comfortable, relaxing and easy, but they're missing one of the world's great cities and cultures, and they're missing interaction and relationship with Mexicans of the present, and their long, difficult, and proud history.

Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

Each year we've gone, there have been fewer white tourists, probably due to American politics and the spread of fear of violence by drug cartels. I often hear Canadians expressing a desire to go to Mexico's capital city, or telling us they've already been, but most Americans look horrified. There are large parts of the city where we would not go, for sure, but it's also true that Mexico City is not where most of the drug-related violence is taking place. Pickpockets operate in every big city: I had my wallet stolen in Rome; it also happens right here in Montreal. I feel sorry that so few people travel there. It certainly hurts the Mexican economy, and doesn't help dispel misconceptions and stereotypes. But I freely admit that it's not an easy place to visit or to become comfortable with. Someday, perhaps, we'll feel like it's too much for us, but I hope not, because it allows us to access a different side of ourselves, it offers challenges for both the body and mind, and gives us an opportunity to learn something about humanity in general that seems repressed in these colder, more formal, and privileged cultures further north.

Saturday salsa dancing, a regular event in the public park near the Ciudadela.

On a personal and even spiritual level, I find it encouraging to go there, because in spite of their terrible government, and the poverty and corruption, many of the people manage to live with a buoyancy and vibrancy, warmth and simplicity I seldom see in our own culture. There is a sense of pride that gets expressed in innumerable ways. Every single evening, the street vendors near our apartment scrubbed all their pans and stoves and then the pavement itself until it shone; people washed the windows of their shops and swept the street; the subways are extremely crowded but clean, with the floors made of glistening marble (beautiful stone is one resource the country has in abundance.) And there's constant music, noise, and color, and attention to design, in minute detail, everywhere, in spite of the hard lives so many people lead. Cultural attitudes, at least among the common people, seem less individualistic and more collective than ours; people look you directly in the eye, they smile, they say buenos dias and buenas tardes, and always return your greeting. Family is still extremely important, and positive, realistic attitudes toward aging, caring for the elderly, death and dying are deeply embedded in the culture. When people hear that we come every year, they smile with pride -- they love their city and their country, and are delighted that we do too. We got into a political discussion with a cab driver, who complained a lot about the candidates in the upcoming election and the general state of things, but then, after having exhausted the subject, he smiled and said, "Pero, yo soy Mexicano!!" "But, I am Mexican!" It spite of it all, he identifies himself as Mexican, not with a political party, or a current government or current problems: being Mexican is so much more than that.

Part of a huge mural by David Alfaro Siquerios about the Mexican revolution and workers' struggle, at the Castillo de Chapultepec

This is an attitude I've observed among other people -- Iranians, for instance, or Chinese -- with a long history who've seen governments, dynasties, dictators, emperors and kings come and go; they are united by language, place, culture and shared history, shared suffering. Mexican history goes back to the Olmecs, the first Meso-American civilization, dating from 1000 B.C., in the region near modern-day Veracruz. In America and Canada, we have nothing comparable: our national histories go back only a few hundred years, and the indigenous cultures were younger and less developed than in Latin America, and so decimated by genocide that few of us share that heritage, while in Mexico, a majority of the people are mixed-race. So here in the northern New World, we are left to piece our identities together from the fragmented histories of the places we, or our ancestors, came from. But it is never entirely satisfactory to understand oneself that way -- at least it hasn't been so for me.

Olmec sculptures, c. 1000-300 BCE, Museo Nacional de Antropologia

I'm interested not so much in nationalisms, but in what makes us human, and the shared qualities that give rise to civilizations. While these questions have been common to cultures for millennia, I find them harder and harder to grasp in the modern political landscape, which seems to me extremely destructive -- perhaps even opposed -- to what we have historically called "human culture" and expressed in different and deeply valued ways. Perhaps that's why I appreciate the experience of going back, for a time, to live in an older society which hasn't yet been taken over by globalization, materialism and greed, and where people are still resistant to the whitewashing of their own culture. Yes, there are some franchises and global brands, American movies and tv, and people wearing t-shirts emblazoned with "Abercrombie & Fitch" and English slogans; there's wealth, multinational corporations, sleek skyscrapers, and a desire for modernization, but the reach of mass media has not yet destroyed the past, or altered people's innate sense of themselves as part of a whole complicated constellation of histories, meanings, and relationships that occurred in that particular place. "Yo soy Mexicano," says the taxi-driver, and he knows what he means.

March 20, 2018

Fifteen years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I started this blog. I just re-read what I wrote on March 20, 2003 (link here, scroll down to the last entry on the page), under my then-new moniker of "Cassandra," after the Trojan princess and prophetess who was cursed to be always right, but disbelieved. Those words from 2003 still sound like me, and I still think what I wrote then is true: that we're witnessing the death-throes of patriarchy and, especially, white male domination of the world and its systems, and that ultimately we'll see a world with greater justice and equality for all of its people -- though the fate of the natural world is not at all secure. In 2003 I tried to take a long view., and still do. But even I would not have prophesied that things would go from bad to so very much worse in the space of this decade and a half, with so much suffering for so many.

On the personal side, we did make some major decisions: we moved. 40% of my tax dollars are no longer being spent on the military, but on a mix of social services such as universal healthcare, prescription drug coverage, affordable daycare for children. I live further north, in a province which is the most progressive in North America, among many people who have a world view and values similar to my own. But though that may make my everyday life more consonant with my beliefs -- and the tax thing was a major moral issue for me -- I think resistance is imperative no matter where we live. As social media data becomes "harvested" for ill purposes, we are all complicit in these larger systems, unconfined by borders and unregulated by government. As migration due to violence, oppression, and hunger affects more and more of the world, are we really going to allow ourselves to be divided into two warring camps: people who have compassion for their neighbors as for themselves, and are willing to share, and those who will do whatever they can to protect what they have from the undeserving, fearful, and inferior "other?"

At a blogger meet-up in Montreal, in spring 2006l: Tom Montag, Lucy Boyce, and Dave Bonta

But, also on the personal side, my life changed because of this blog. In addition to the extremely valuable practice of near-daily writing, it has given me some of the best friends of my life, and relationships and conversations that continue to this day. In recent years it's given me a forum for sharing not just my thoughts in words and photographs, but my art, and all three of those personal pursuits have improved hugely as a result. In turn, I've been privileged to read your words and see your bodies of work develop and change. Out of those relationships have come several collaborative efforts, including a literary magazine, qarrtsiluni, and my own publishing venture, Phoenicia. And this blog also functions for me like the diaries I kept before: as a personal record of my life and thoughts that would now fill a small shelf of books. So I can't even find words for how significant blogging has been for me, but I'm extremely grateful.

An earlier version of us, in Montreal, 2006

For some of us who've hung in here for a long time, there's another factor that bears consideration. We've seen the rise of social media, and the exodus from blogging as a result -- and I understand why that has happened, both in terms of the ease of communication afforded by social media, and the decline in blog readership and commenting that many of us have found discouraging. I often wonder who is still reading here, beyond those who tell me so. But, just like the demise of the book, the prediction of the death of serious longer-form personal writing on the web seems to have been not only premature but wrong. I see the pendulum swinging back somewhat; for instance, this January, poets Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon suggested that writer-bloggers resolve to post on their blogs once a week, and the list who signed on became huge. My friend Dave Bonta has been making a weekly compendium of some of the best of those posts in his Poet Bloggers Revival Digest. Quite a few of us have gained readers through posting links to our blog from Instagram or Facebook; others use long-form platforms such as Medium.

In my studio, with a young Manon, and art inspired by Iceland, 2008.

But as we see the more nefarious side of social media, questions do (and should) arise about our own participation. I want to own my own content, and I want to control my own presence on the web -- the only way to do that is to maintain my own sites, and limit my use of social media. The incursions into privacy that have happened over these fifteen years are way beyond anything I would have envisioned, and millions of us have rolled over and done exactly what the mega-corporations have wanted us to do, becoming unwitting pawns for financial gain and political exploitation. I'm going to be looking hard at this, and hope you will too.

March 19, 2018

These recent drawings represent, I guess, a more inclusive view than some of my older, close-up still-lives. I've been adding some background indications of the interior space of the rooms for some additional complexity and a bit of close/far focus. It's also good practice in the sort of non-academic perspective I'm trying to achieve.

But there's a personal story, too. This drawing is a reminder of a special and happy evening with friends; I did it early the next morning, before we had cleaned up all the dishes and folded the leaves of our table back to normal size. We like using this tablecloth when we have a lot of guests - it's a deep red cotton, large, with twelve napkins, and came from Damascus, when my husband went there with his elderly father and his brother in 2000, before the wars. Originally, this type of tablecloth, called "Aghabani," must have been embroidered by hand in an elaborate chain stitch and traditional patterns. Later they were made in the countryside around Damascus by seamstresses who used embroidery machines.

The word "damask," of course, comes from "Damascus" -- the city was a center of elaborate silk weaving in the early Middle Ages, up until about the 9th century, because of its location as a trading center on the silk road. In a traditional flat-weave damask, there are contrasting warp and weft yarns, one shiny and one dull, that create the typical difference in sheen that characterizes a damask pattern. I don't know if these embroidered linens were done as a substitute for woven silk damask, or if they pre-dated them, but they utilize the same idea of a shiny design on a matte background. Jonathan brought back two for us - this red one, and another in pure white, but we also have a smaller grey one with gold embroidery that's very lovely. I never thought to use them as a base for still-lives before.

March 15, 2018

7,000 pairs of shoes were placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn on Tuesday to symbolize the number of children killed by gun violence in the United States since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012.

This week I've read three loosely related articles that I wanted to recommend to others who may be thinking, as I am, about the continued and unabated rise in U.S. gun violence, the factors that drive white male rage, and the rise of far-right political ideologies in the western world. These are all thoughtful pieces, well worth your time. I'm trying to educate myself about where these trends can actually go, if unchecked, but also to understand the forces that attract people to guns, violence, and far-right ideologies in the first place. Not all gun violence is the same: many of the school shooters have been male loners who have targeted white children, and have not subscribed to a particular political ideology, while other mass killers have been politically motivated. Most, however, seem to have felt powerless in current society, and turned to guns as the ultimate means of expressing themselves.

According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile. These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

From May 20, 2017, through this Monday, the A.D.L.’s Center on Extremism found, there were 72 such episodes. Before that period, the A.D.L. had not documented any white supremacist banners since Dec. 11, 2016...Most of those documented in Thursday’s report were racist or anti-immigrant in nature, with messages ranging from “America first: End immigration” to “‘Diversity’ is a code word for white genocide.” Others were anti-Muslim (a banner displayed on an overpass near Dearborn, Mich., home to one of the largest mosques in North America, read “DANGER: Sharia city ahead”), anti-Semitic (“UNjew HUMANITY”) or misogynistic (“Feminists deserve the rope”).

"CasaPound presented itself as the house of the ideologically homeless too. Iannone said it offered “a space of liberty, where anyone who has something to say and can’t say it elsewhere will always find political asylum”. It adopted a pose of being not a part of the debate, but the receptacle of it. It reminded some of Mussolini’s line that “fascism is the church of all the heresies”.

A friend from a while ago, now an Episcopal priest, had a mantra I've never forgotten: "All anger is fear; all fear is fear of loss." While it's an oversimplification, it holds a lot of truth -- as I've found when asking myself, at times, what is the source of my own anger. And of course I'm angry when I look at the news of the world and, especially, in my former home of America. When I look deeper, I can see that this anger has its roots in a profound sense of fear that the entire fabric of American life is unraveling, and that the principles on which the country was founded have been irrevocably undermined. There has also been fear for individual people I know and love, including members of my own family, and myself by extension.

Of course, for a fairly large number of other Americans, the exact opposite fear is evoked: they feel that America was founded for, and should be run by, white men like themselves, and that immigration and racial diversity, as well as equality between men and women, and open acceptance of gender diversity, are all grave threats to their country and their own safety, security, and identity. Many liberals seem to believe the pendulum is going to swing back to some sort of tolerable middle, if we could just get rid of the current administration.

I think that's incredibly naive. The cat is out of the proverbial bag, and growing into a hungry, noisy, muscled tiger that can't be domesticated. Perhaps it will always stay on the fringes, growling and occasionally coming into the village under cover of darkness to claim some victims. You can believe that if you want to; history has often showed us otherwise. When human beings are afraid, they resort to behaviors that always blame, demonize, and eventually dehumanize "the other", allowing unacceptable acts. Those range from the establishment of police states (which can be overt or subtle) that excuse and allow the breakdown of privacy laws, to covert and open wars and genocide, to deportations and incarceration of people on ethnic or religious grounds, to forced interrogations and torture, and the rise of fascist political movements that make formerly illegal actions not only legal, but accepted as necessary.

And, as the article about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Italy points out, the new alt-right is clever and astute, opening itself not just to a narrow political spectrum, but as a home for anyone who feels forgotten, voiceless, politically disenfranchised. The leaders are savvy about media and popular culture, using unlikely strategies to reach converts, as well as squishy messages -- drawn even from left-wing causes -- to popularize their groups and their message.

Canadians tend to look south across the border with a kind of well-meant, pitying bemusement, and we all tell ourselves, "that couldn't happen here." Maybe not - I certainly hope not - but there are far-right groups in Canada too. Until twenty years ago, I never thought I'd see what is happening in the U.S. happen there: I thought the people would never allow it. I was completely wrong. It's possible that #TurnThemOut will triumph in the U.S. mid-term election, but the power of groups like the NRA will continue, as will the spinelessness of most members of Congress who care more about being re-elected than about children's lives, and who refuse to stand up against hate crime, hate speech, privacy violations in the name of "security", and torture -- to name just a few of the actions that ought to be completely unacceptable and illegal in a modern democracy.

Regardless of what country we live in, we have to see clearly that western democracies are presently under a serious threat. This does not mean that those governments were formerly blameless, without major issues, blind spots, and ongoing grievous sins that that they have failed to address throughout their own histories. I think you know what I mean. But we have to open our eyes and stop fooling ourselves that the forces that threaten the very underling principles of freedom and equality will slink back into the darkness, as the world becomes more migrant and more brown: they won't.

We need to remember, over and over, that only pressure from the grassroots will ultimately change governmental policies. The far-right is, after all, a grassroots movement that has been emboldened by the likes of Trump and Bannon and the resurgence of neo-Nazi and fascist groups worldwide: they are angry and fearful people who are racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim, believe in white supremacy, and see their worldview threatened by immigration, black presidents, women in power, diversity in formerly white cities and towns that threatens to become diversity in one's own family. Why do progressives tend to trust in top-down solutions? Why do we think that a vote alone is enough to combat such an ideology? We had eight years of Obama's presidency and what we are seeing now is not an aberration, it is in part a backlash by people who absolutely hated seeing a black man in that office.

It's been proven that people who experience and live with diversity have the most positive attitudes toward those who are different from themselves. It's also true that we tend to form into groups and communities with those who are like us. This makes it obvious and imperative that diversity must be encouraged by individuals, and be brought by us to all our organizations and social structures -- families, churches, informal and formal civic groups, workplaces, institutions and organizations. Within these structures, we can bring awareness to the ways in which we ourselves fail to see with the eyes of the other. Some people have hidebound attitudes, but it is crucial to believe that fundamental changes of heart are possible -- the ability to change is one of humanity's greatest attributes. If talk doesn't get us anywhere, we must openly live within the spirit of our convictions, and by doing so, we can actually gradually effect lasting, long-term change: I've seen this over and over again in the greater acceptance of homosexuality and gender diversity over the past few decades.

So some questions for today are these: how many friends do you have who are of different religions, different ethnic origins, different genders or sexual orientations? How often are you in the position of being in the minority, of listening to and learning from others who are different from yourself? How do you bring your own changed and evolving views back to your family, your circle of friends, your workplace, and the organizations to which you belong?

February 07, 2018

Yesterday, with several hours between downtown meetings, we went to the current big exhibition at Montreal's Beaux-Arts Museum, about life at Napoleon's court. Ten years ago, the museum received a large bequest of one of the world's largest collections of Napoleonic memorabilia, from Ben Weider, the Montreal-born Canadian fitness entrepreneur. According to the notes on the exhibition, Weider had a lifelong fascination with the French ruler, and believed he had been wronged by history and was poisoned by the English on St. Helena. He was the founder and president of the International Napoleonic Society, became a member in 2000 of the French Legion of Honor (established by Napoleon himself) theories on Napoleonic history. Whatever that has to say about Weider, or Quebec, I won't speculate, but the fact is that in conjunction with major museums and collections in France, the Beaux-Arts has mounted a large and impressive exhibition that does give a pretty good idea of what life at Napoleon's court was like.

Hand-painted Sèvres porcelain.

Hand-embroidered waistcoat and jacket for a man in the Grand Chamberlain's service.

The exhibition includes major paintings by David, Ingres, Gros, Prud'hon and Gerard, as well as gold and vermiel tableware from Napoleon's court; hand-painted Sevres china; hunting rifles; elaborately embroidered clothing; furniture; a collection of cardboard soldiers representing the various regiments; crucifixes, candle-stands and communion vessels from the private chapel; and paintings and artifacts from the exiles on Elba and St Helena.

Portrait of Talleyrand, by Paul Prud'hon.

There were portraits by the great French painters of that time of all the major figures of the court, his two wives, the popes and cardinals -- and there were paintings of hunting, of wars, of favorite horses, of parades through Paris, of women of the court with their children. The overriding impression though, was of a man who calculated how to style himself as Emperor and did everything in his power to establish and maintain his ultimate sovereignty.

Portrait of Raza Roustam, Mameluke (1806) by Jacques Nicholas Paillot de Montabert. Raza Roustam had been kidnapped in Georgia at the age of thirteen and became a Mameluke -- the Arabic term for slave -- in the service of the bey of Cairo. During the Egyptian campaign, he was presented to Napoleon, who afterwards kept him at his side, attached to the royal household; Roustam slept outside Napoleon's bedroom "His primary function was that of a good-natured and non-threatening figure splendidly garbed in muslin and trimmings with a role in the spectacle of everyday life in the imperial court."

"The Dream of Ossian," painted by Ingres for the ceiling of Napoleon's bedroom in the Roman palace he never occupied; Ingres bought back the painting after Napoleon's death and reworked it.

It's astounding that a man who rose to power after the French Revolution had toppled the monarchy could have had such overreach, such megalomania, and established a court with as much excess as the Kings of France. Napoleon even styled his son "The King of Rome," and imprisoned the the pope who had crowned him after installing his own uncle, a cardinal, as the religious figurehead of his realm. And the people who had only a little earlier cried "off with their heads!" accepted it! It's incredible!

I walked through the rooms with a strange combination of disgust mixed with appreciation for the sheer beauty and workmanship in the paintings, textiles, and porcelain in particular. And I was grateful to be seeing these paintings in Montreal, where security is minimal, the galleries aren't crowded and a visitor like me can get close to the surface of the paintings to study them. Regardless of the subjects they were painting, the French artists of that time were astounding masters.

And then we returned home to the news of the current American president's plans for a great military parade: a president who already believes himself above the law, spends the taxpayers' money like water, has no compassion for the poor or disenfranchised, and could easily involve the nation is more wars. There's really not much to say; the agonized eyes of Ossian's dog express the feelings better than words.